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Homegrown IT Tools Can't Keep Pace |
NEWS |
By 2030, the number of production-ready additive manufacturing platforms that ship each year will increase more than tenfold (more than US$325 billion in hardware and related systems revenue). These systems will produce more than US$360 billion worth of parts and end products each year (up from US$6.8 billion today) and nearly US$2 trillion in sum by the end of the next decade (MD-AMMT-101). These systems will need to work with the ones that came before them. Today, most do not.
The field of Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) is, like the systems it supports, evolving from manufacturing execution (data acquisition) to digitalization (data synchronization and contextualization) and, soon, higher levels of intelligence (data augmentation). Companies like PTC, which acquired Frustum at the end of 2018 (after the US$1 Billion Rockwell tie-up) and Siemens, which acquired low-code developer Mendix on the heels of its of Mentor Graphics pickup (in 2018 and 2017, respectively), have started to show their cards, and there are several key takeaways the industrial industry must heed.
Process Change is a Process |
IMPACT |
All the major automotive and aerospace vendors used to develop their own manufacturing execution systems (MES), but, even then, standardization was a problem. Different processes drove different results. It didn’t matter if it was one factory in a network of two or five factories in a network of twenty--if the molding and QA processes weren’t the same, neither were the end products. While most of these companies have since moved away from their proprietary systems in favor of more user-friendly off-the-shelf MES solutions, the propensity to standardize on results before process needs to be reversed. Hybrid manufacturing will command it.
For technologies like additive manufacturing and generative design, this is clear: MES is the solution to the MOM orchestration problem the industry doesn’t yet know it has. Here’s why: When you introduce compelling and radically new technologies, especially in large, established, and/or well understood markets such as manufacturing, there is a long transitionary period during which high CAPEX items can be amortized through operations. We are now entering this period, but it’s for these same reasons that MES thinking needs to be applied to MOM implementations; the core of MES is advanced planning and scheduling, and the core of what MOM needs and will become is orchestration based on the availability and effectiveness of a certain process.
MOM's Low-Hanging Fruit |
RECOMMENDATIONS |
Simulation and virtualization shorten cycles and improve yield. Companies with end-to-end ownership of both digital (ThingWorx, Mindsphere, Ability, etc.) and physical systems (PTC/Rockwell, Siemens, and ABB, respectively) have a leg up in terms of integration and implementation, but the reality is that not everyone subscribes to a single hardware/software ecosystem. This is why there are integrators and also why there is a big push in the industrial platform space--to minimize the number of vendors and touchpoints, yet maximize the number of assets with which they interoperate. Managing the associated technical and business complexity puts MOM in the spotlight.
The quickest ROI for MOM implementations is (in order):